Wednesday, August 8, 2012

AD&D's Apocalypse and Hereafter

“When the Invoked Devastation came
upon the Baklunish, their own magi brought down the Rain of Colorless
Fire in a last terrible curse, and this so affected the Suloise
Empire as to cause it to become the Sea of Dust.”

- World of Greyhawk (1980)

“And no bells tolled and nobody
wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected
death...And people said and believed, 'this is the end of the
world.'”

- Agnolo Tura of Siena (mid-14th
century)

I've circled around the margins of theme before—as have a few others—but there is a heady whiff of
apocalypse in old school D&D. It's seen not just in the rather obvious stock elements--the countless ruins, the lost artifacts, the
former sprawl of civilization lost to the wilds—but hard-coded
throughout the rules proper whenever broad human society is involved.

The closer in I go with this AD&D
exegesis the more I see this perspective reinforced in spades.

Let's get started by bouncing back to an
unlikely place, the Encounters section of the DMG (Appendix C) to pick
apart a peculiar section on outdoor encounters (pages 182-183).

Civilization: A Thin Red Line

For starters you get smacked over the
head with how desperate life must be even inside the few “inhabited”
zones of the implied world. For you see with every encounter rolled
in such areas, there is a full 25% chance that the random encounter
table should be utterly ignored and a patrol encountered instead.

And by patrol we are not talking about
a small group of muddling watch or a handful of tax
collectors/wardens, we are talking armed-to-the-teeth, recon in
force. Such patrols are always lead by a fairly formidable leader, a
fighter or ranger of a whopping 6-8th level, who has a
lieutenant of 4-5th level and a sergeant of 2-3rd
level (and this doesn't add in the 40% chance of a 6-7th
level cleric and a 60% chance of a 5-8th level magic
user). Even the enlisted men are tough, three to four alone being
1st level veterans sprinkled among a further 13-24
men-at-arms. All patrol fighters with levels have plate armor,
mounts, and an arsenal of weapons. Even the grunts are humping chain
(and scale at the worst).

The sheer frequency of meeting such
heavily-powered up bands—hell even a mid-level party would find the
standard issue patrol of normal men a tough go--inside the settled
environs sends a strong message that this is a world right on the
knife's edge.

Not only is civilization an
obsessively-patrolled armed camp, it is also damn sparse.

The section counsels a DM who hasn't
keyed out settlements to use the random terrain charts in Appendix B
to do so. These speak wonders about how low the population density
is: there's only a 16% chance per “area” (a mile is suggested) of
a settlement of any kind. And 16 percent chance breaks down further
with the highest chances being a single dwelling, a tiny
thorpe/hamlet, or a ruin.

Compare that to 12th century
Britain--which even though it's population density was less than half
France's of the time—was still around 40 people to each square
mile.

Yet if it isn't the12th
century, it could be more the cataclysmic mid-14th
century. Much like the mass sorcerous devastations of Greyhawk,
bubonic plague depopulated Europe to an unprecedented degree—and
along with the long wars and other disruptions of that
period--unlocked a massive social and political disintegration.

Foissart, a contemporary chronicler,
famously said “a third of the world died.” Modern estimates of a
50-60% mortality rate in Europe incredibly make that an
understatement.

Whatever the death count, the breakdown
of the old order is (relatively) well-documented. Here's Tuchman's
Distant Mirror again; “Hill farms and sections of poor soil
were let go or turned to pasture for sheep which required less labor.
Villages weakened by depopulation...were deserted in increasing
numbers. Property boundaries vanished when fields reverted to
wasteland. Landowners impoverished by these factors sank out of sight
or let castles and manors decay while they entered the military
brigandage that was to be the curse of the following decades.”

The Lost Edge

Ok so if the DMG establishes that
post-breakdown civilization is sparsely-inhabited garrison states,
the very next section in the DMG oddly implies that the wilderness
seems to be reasonably stocked out with fortified outposts. For every
encounter in the wilderness there is a 1 in 20 chance that each and
every random encounter will be superseded by bumping into...a
fortress of all things.

And all these fortresses are not
rinky-dink little palisaded affairs on the whole. There is a full on
45% chance that they are at least stout stone-walled medium-sized
castles (large shell keeps and small or medium walled castles with
keeps) and a further 20% chance of it being a large fortress of some
kind.

The Inhabitants sub-chart clears up the
mystery, these scattered sites are the markers for where humanity
lost the fight with entropy--or is barely holding the walls.

See now 45% of the all the small forts
are completely deserted (30% for medium and 15% large). Monsters
inhabit a further 15-25% of the time. “Humans” (social “monsters”
again, bandits, beserkers, dervishes with a full 60% chance of them
being brigands) are encountered 10-20%. Only in the remaining
minority of the time is the fortress held by the ruling name-level
characters we would expect.

While there is much here to mine again
about AD&D's domain-play, I will rest that thread for another
time, but I think you get a sense of what I am going for here.

AD&D's isn't just a hard-fought
world that merely experienced the fall of great empires centuries
before, it's one where humanity came close to the abyss in the recent
past—and has stayed there. It's on that stage of pure chaos that
player-character, the rootless opportunists knocked out of the fabric
of society, find themselves adventuring in.

31 comments:

You can definitely see where they got the "points of light" idea that came bundled in 4E. It reminds me half of a degenerate apocalyptic science-fantasy angle, and half "stumble into Faerie" fairy tale/mysterious castle type of thing. I think there's more to be uncovered in the heritage of domain play in D&D.

You know I never really thought about this before (I always just thought high-level spells), but it makes you wonder if the Greyhawk prehistorical apocalypse was imagined as some kind of nuclear ("Rain of Colorless Fire") or science-fantasy exchange. ﻿

Or maybe, somewhere, you realise that the left can really only exist where there is a safe niche that has been carved out by the centre, or right, a long time ago. That would mirror the history of the west, after all.

Also, of course, the filters we put in so it made sense... I always wondered, where did all those high-level people come from? You could be walking down the street and just bump into an 11th level illusionist you'd never even heard of before.

All the monsters and encounters sections are at odds with the less frequent appearance of levelled NPCs that are said int he DMG to be found in cities. I guess you make the case that it's because the tough ones are "out there" beyond the walls, battling at the knife's edge.

Looks like the relationship between X.P. and civilization is a lot more complex than conventional "Gygaxian naturalism" would indicate. I'm sure someone's already come up with a unified field theory of risk, reward, town & country.

Speaking of faerie, I just rediscovered an article in TD 40 ("Believe it or not, Fantasy has reality") that proposes a line similar to what you have in the Cantons between "Wyrd" and "Home" areas. Might be some ideas toward a trans-domain-level game in there. It generates a kind of proto-Pendragon, which is nice.

That was the first issue of Dragon I ever read, so it had a huge, if half-digested impact. There's still a lot to mine there. I like that idea of a World Pattern matrix that can be upset or pulled back by acts in the campaign world.

It's great stuff. His first appearance in TD 39 was my first issue and it blew my mind. Wonder what happened to him.

Anyhow, what you uncovered here goes a long way to explaining why the kingdom heavies are so busy that the PCs kept getting shanghaied on "offer you can't refuse" missions. Strongholds aren't cheap in terms of skilled labor and materials and the loss ratios are just too high.

Wyrd and Weird are not the same thing at all. Weird is odd and strange... whereas Wyrd refers to a complex weaving of fate and destiny; Wyrd has three strands to it (past, present and future) which are all woven together at once; each moment's pattern is therefore different as the weavers weave their patterns in to the fabric of reality all at once. So reality does not resemble the past, nor the present, nor the future, from moment to moment, but actually, something else again. This is the Wyrd.

@BombasticusI do wonder what happened to that guy too. He raised some provocative questions in both his Dragon articles (I went at looked at the Issue 39 after you pointed that out).

Like this:"I do not wish to say that we cannot learn some lessons from Fantasy, but I would argue that Fantasy is not designed to teach us anything. If someone uses a fantasy game or novel as a soap box or a pulpit, that person has perverted Fantasy and has turned a form of art into a form of propaganda or pornography.

Fantasy will not tolerate teaching or preaching. Nor will Faerie accept the imposition of moral concerns from “real life.” Nevertheless, there is an inherent morality to Fantasy. It is not a morality of law, but a morality of being."

I don't agree with all of it, but I appreciate how serious and polemical he takes the discussion.

@Recursion KingYes I am aware of the difference. I deliberately switched and blurred the distinction from Bachmann's. In his account, the Wyrd is where a hero goes to fulfill their Campbell hero destiny. The HC's Weird is a rupture of the fabric of the human-made world. Adventurers don't enter it to make it as heroes, they go in because they themselves are shook out of the same fabric.

Douglas Bachmann, if you can see this, please come back and develop your extremely serious arguments further. Or if you've left the green fields of earth behind for good, all I have to say is thanks for blazing the trail!

brigand c.1400, "lightly armed foot soldier," from O.Fr. ... Sense of "one who lives by pillaging" is from early 15c., reflecting the lack of distinction between professional mercenary armies and armed, organized criminals.

I hadn't thought about it in terms of overall distribution, a good point.

Given the long population boom of the High Middle Ages, probably a better comparison would have been the 14th century anyway. I was reading last night that the population of pre-plague France was quite high, the equal of 17th century France in density.

The Domesday Book might be a bit misleading, in that even a single household could be counted. I've read population estimates of as little as 2-3 people per square mile for northern England, for example. But I'm far from an expert, perhaps I'm wrong.

Yes. Nice bit of organisation.--Re: Gamma World's Legion of Gold's Intro and Starting Base make a 'bit more sense' in its early feudalism. GH is clearly the latter play-out of the same world-changing events.